Google has at last updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer. Just yesterday we complained about the fact that it hadn’t been updated since July. Thank you to the anonymous GEB reader who let us know in the comments that it has now been updated. It appears that not all current imagery has made it into historical imagery yet.

We will attempt to do a map of imagery updates over the coming days, but it will be difficult as the new global mosaics of Landsat / Sentinel-2 imagery make it much harder. When you are zoomed out, Google Earth only shows the mosaics and yearly dates, so it is necessary to zoom quite a long way in to read the time toolbar to get the list of available dates for a given location. In addition, the Google Earth API is being shut down on January 11th, so after that we will not be able to create such maps.

Today we are looking at a few large wildfires in the US.

Clayton Fire, California
The Clayton Fire started on August 13, 2016 and destroyed 300 buildings.

Junkins Fire, ColoradoThe Junkins Fire took place in late October, 2016 and can be seen still burning in the imagery. It appears to have mostly affected wilderness (it is named for Junkins Park, Colorado) but it did destroy 9 homes and 17 outbuildings

Beaver Creek Fire, ColoradoThe Beaver Creek Fire apparently kept burning for over two months. We can see smoke from the fire in imagery from July and August 2016.

Soberanes Fire, CaliforniaAccording to Wikipedia the Soberanes Fire was the most expensive wildfire in United States history, costing $236 million to suppress. It was worth the expense as Robert Baird, supervisor of the Los Padres National Forest, estimated that firefighters saved US$6.8 billion worth of real estate despite 57 homes and 11 outbuildings being destroyed.

Lion, the Saroo Brierley story featured in a Voyager layer
In November, Google updated the Voyager layer to Edition 3 featuring the story of Saroo Brierley who found his way home with the aid of Google Earth. The story has been made into a move called ‘Lion’.

No ‘historical imagery’ updates
Google has been very active with imagery updates, adding new imagery on an almost weekly basis. For the first half of the year we were able to track these changes with the help of ‘historical imagery’ and the Google Earth API. But, from about July onwards, although Google has continued to add imagery to the default layer, no updates have been made to ‘historical imagery’ other than the addition of the global Landsat / Sentinel-2 mosaics mentioned above. This has made tracking the full extent of imagery updates impossible.

Panoramio
Google announced that it will be shutting down Panoramio. The Panoramio layer in Google Earth is very popular and has a lot of photos in areas where Street View does not have coverage. The shutdown date is set for November 2017. We had a brief scare when the images stopped showing in Google Earth and we thought the layer had been removed early, but it turned out to be a technical problem that was soon fixed.

Google Earth Plugin / API
Having been deprecated in December 2014, Google announced that the Google Earth Plugin / API will finally be shut down on January 11, 2017.

Old versions
In addition to shutting down the Google Earth plugin / API, Google is discontinuing support for Google Earth 4 on January 11, 2017.